Friday 29 August 2003 20.16 EDT
First published on Friday 29 August 2003 20.16 EDT

Dr Sweet and His Daughterby Peter Bradshaw 352pp, Picador, £10.99

There are echoes here of an earlier generation of writers - Evelyn Waugh, in particular, comes to mind - but the action of this darkly comic novel is firmly located amid the bustle of contemporary London. At 41, Dr David Sweet is already beginning to lose his grip on a world that seems to be moving too fast for him: his experimental work at the cancer research laboratory is yielding no significant results, a furtive affair with one of his researchers is fizzling out in a haze of guilt and anxiety and, as the narrative opens, his ex-wife, Alice, is about to join him and their small daughter, Cordie, for a Christmas reunion. Within minutes of Alice's arrival, Sweet knows he's in for a miserable week. In fact, it proves far worse than he could have imagined: before the day is out, he has killed someone.

That's the way he phrases it to himself, but the event is actually considerably more ambiguous than his formulation suggests. Nipping out to his local supermarket in order to avoid a row with Alice, he finds himself drawn into an altogether more dangerous altercation when the store manager's young daughter is menaced by a vagrant. In the ensuing scuffle the man, responding to a nervous feint by Sweet, loses his footing, strikes the back of his head on the floor and dies instantly. Unfortunately for Sweet, the manager gives the police a version of events that suggests Sweet was the bottle-wielding killer and the vagrant his innocent victim. It's only a matter of time before officers arrest the hapless scientist on suspicion of murder.

The novel's opening chapters offer a wry but essentially realistic take on contemporary life, but the narrative rapidly spirals off into wilder territory. The vagrant, it transpires, was once charged with exposing himself in a children's playground; he is labelled by the tabloids as a "registered paedophile", while Sweet becomes, predictably enough, the "have-a-go hero doc". From the moment he buys into the myth of his own heroism, his life is transformed. He becomes an instant celebrity, and succeeds in curing cancer in his laboratory mice. As his self-confidence builds to a new high, he begins to plan his Nobel acceptance speech.

Bradshaw's handling of the more fantastic elements of his plot is appreciably less assured than his finely nuanced treatment of the ordinary - the small humiliations of middle age, the complex interplay of love, need and resistance in the relationship between a doting father and his precocious daughter. He has an eye for poignant detail - Sweet's ageing parents abandoned on a playground roundabout by a granddaughter who has found something better to do, or Sweet himself shuffling along behind an ex-wife too busy exercising her renewed powers of sexual attraction to notice his misery. It's in such details that Bradshaw reveals his true strengths as a subtle and compassionate chronicler of everyday life.